Courage froze mid-step, his morning bone clattering to the porch. Dust swirled in a wind that didn't exist a second ago. The sky above the middle of nowhere had turned the color of old papyrus.
Ramses tilted his head—once, like a bird, but wrong, like a statue remembering how to move—and then crumbled into a pyramid of fine gray ash. The locusts became leaves. The sky turned blue again. courage the cowardly dog ramses
Courage looked at the house. Muriel was humming inside, unaware. Eustace was probably napping with his mask on. Neither of them had touched the slab. Neither of them remembered the traveling salesman who’d left it last Tuesday, carved with a curse in a language Courage could read perfectly—because fear, he’d long ago learned, is a universal translator. Courage froze mid-step, his morning bone clattering to